Vulnerability to depression linked to noradrenaline

The team of Bruno Giros, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and professor of psychiatry at McGill University, reports the first-ever connection between noradrenergic neurons and vulnerability to depression. Published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, this breakthrough paves the way for new depression treatments that target the adrenergic system. Stressful life events–job loss, accident, death of a loved one–can trigger major depression in one person, but not in another. A deciding factor is resilience, a biological mechanism that determines an individual’s capacity to rebound from stressful or traumatic events. Researchers are still learning how resilience works. “We know that a small cerebral structure, known as the ventral tegmental area, contains dopaminergic neurons that play a key role in vulnerability to depression,” explains Bruno Giros, whose team is…